HEARING THE HEAT INDEX CAN CAUSE HEATSTROKE

Here's the scene: You're huddled around a cold drink in your living room watching TV. You flip the channel and there is a weatherman and a weather chart. The weather chart is speckled with places and temperatures: Lakeland, 111; Melbourne, 119; Orlando, 106. And that's in the shade, the weatherman says. Naturally, you keel over.

You are a victim of a new syndrome: heat index prostration.

The heat index is sort of a reverse wind chill index, combining air temperature with relative humidity to yield a truly frightening number that looks more like a winning professional basketball score than a temperature. That number is supposed to represent what hot weather "feels like to the average person," according to the National Weather Service, which invented the heat index last summer. This week the heat index has really come into its own.

The wind chill index was bad enough. In the old days up North, people would just say that it was 10 below zero, and leave unspoken the fact that it felt even colder when the wind was blowing. But since the invention of the wind chill index, Northerners have been getting into stupid discussions like: "It went down to 10 below last night."

First guy who pulls that "really" business on me gets staked to a freshly tarred K mart parking lot at high noon, with a heat index of 130.

Everyone knows that humidity makes hot weather feel hotter (thus the expression "But it's a dry heat"). The National Weather Service has done us the favor of quantifying the obvious and scaring the daylights out of us. Now you can get a coronary from watching the weather as well as walking around in it.

Of course, the folks at the weather service have a public-service rationale for their diabolical new invention. It is a lot like all those other public services they provide. You know, all those swell suggestions for getting through a heat wave: Stay out of the sun. Wear lightweight clothing. Run the air conditioner (assuming you have one). Don't do push-ups in thermal underwear in front of the exhaust vent of your dryer. The weather service is really helpful this way.

The weather service claims the heat index will alert the public "to the health hazards of excessive heat and humidity during heat waves." (Hey, I didn't know.) As part of this effort, they provide a chart of what happens to the human body at various levels of the heat index.

An air temperature of 100 degrees and a relative humidity of 50 percent yield a heat index of 120, "Very Hot," and sunstroke and heat exhaustion are likely. If the temperature remained constant, but the relative humidity went up to 60 percent, the heat index would jump to 130, "Extremely Hot," and heatstroke or sunstroke would be "imminent."

So if you want to know if you are in imminent danger of heatstroke, don't listen to your body, listen to the heat index. But don't feel bad. Remember, if the heat index is 100, that's 700 for dogs.

HOW HOT WAS IT? Really, how hot is it? Sure, it's a cliche, but it's a great cliche. When this heat wave is over (let us pray), we'll all have tales about how hot it was during the great heat wave of June 1985. Let's get our it-was-so-hot lines ready. How hot was it?

It was so hot the hens were laying hard-boiled eggs. It was so hot the scorpions were sweating. It was so hot the posh puddled on Park Avenue. It was so hot Publix charged admission.

It was so hot anchormen loosened their ties. It was so hot that saying "Hot enough for you?" was grounds for justifiable homicide. It was so hot Naugahyde killed more drivers than collisions. It was so hot. . . .

You tell me. Best how-hot-was-it one-liner wins a free pass to Body Heat in an air-conditioned theater, or equivalent prize. Send your hot humor to me, care of the best air-conditioned newspaper in Florida. I'm following the National Weather Service's recommendations to stay in a cool place, to drink plenty of fluids and to avoid strenuous exercise in cars parked in the bright sun.